The present invention relates to component mounters and mounting methods such as for picking up electronic components from a component feeder carriage and mounting them on a substrate.
A typical component mounter for mounting electronic components on a substrate picks up components stored in a feeder carriage with its mounting head provided with a suction nozzle, transfers them to above the substrate, and mounts them at predetermined mounting points. Before mounting components on the substrate, components are recognized to check their type and any positional deviation. This recognition is implemented by capturing the image of a component held with the mounting head by a camera installed underneath before the mounting operation.
Some mounters have a mounting head equipped with two or more suction nozzles for improving the mounting efficiency. This type of mounting head with multiple suction nozzles allows the picking up of two or more components when moving to the feeder carriage and picking up components to increase the efficiency of the pick-up process. After picking up the components, the mounting head moves over the camera to allow component recognition, at which point the image of each component is captured and recognized. Each component is then sequentially mounted at their predetermined mounting points on the substrate while correcting any detected positional deviation.
Conventionally, however, recognition is executed for all components held by the mounting head before starting to mount them on the substrate when using a mounting head with multiple nozzles to mount multiple components. This requires considerable time to recognize all the components, particularly if the number of components held by the head increases. Since no mounting takes place during recognition, this extends the overall mounting tact time. Accordingly, to improve the mounting efficiency, it is necessary to eliminate this wasteful time during recognition.
The present invention aims to provide a component mounter and mounting method for efficiently mounting components using a mounting head with multiple nozzles.
The component mounter of the present invention includes:
(a) a component feeder carriage;
(b) a mounting head having two or more suction nozzles for picking up components from the feeder carriage;
(c) image capturing means for taking the image of each component held with the suction nozzles; and
(d) recognizer for recognizing each component using image data obtained through the image capturing means in accordance with a mounting sequence of each component.
Each component is mounted on a mounting target (such as substrate), one by one, after recognition.
This configuration allows to eliminate a wasteful standby time for improving the component mounting efficiency.
The component mounting method of the present invention includes the next steps:
(a) picking up components from the feeder carriage using the mounting head with two or more suction nozzles;
(b) capturing the image of each component held with the suction nozzles by the image capturing means;
(c) recognizing each component, according to its mounting sequence, using the captured image in accordance with a mounting sequence by a recognizer; and
(d) mounting the recognized component, one by one onto the mounting target (such as a substrate).
In this method, each component is recognized according to its mounting sequence after capturing images. of multiple components. Then, the recognized component is mounted on the substrate immediately. This allows to start the mounting operation without waiting for recognition of all components picked up. Consequently, the efficiency of the component mounting process improves by the elimination of wasteful standby time.